Every night when Rosie's father, the widower apothecary, had drunk himself into a stupor, Deliverance came to the witch's Circle with gifts and stayed to hold her through the night. While she slept he would whisper, “My sweet, sweet, delicious Rosie. You please me well.”
It is a well-known fact that demons produce sperm when coupling with other creatures who have demon blood, no matter how small the proportion. Of course, he knew that pregnancy was a possibility. What he did not know was that it was possible his love could leave him, in one way or another.
When Rosie Pottinger realized she was pregnant with the child of a sex demon who could not be faithful to her, she first became despondent and then depressed. The more melancholy she suffered, the more she became convinced that the cause of her suffering was sin in the Christian sense; specifically the sin of cavorting with a demon. Though she had never been religious and had not been educated in anti-demon doctrine, she sought out the Church as a possible source of comfort if not resolution.
She went to a priest and confessed everything from the means by which she had deliberately conjured the demon to the pleasures that she had found with him nightly on the pallet inside her Circle.
The priest never doubted for an instant that she was mentally troubled; that, at the least, she suffered delusions of sexual fantasy. The fact that she was fantasizing about intimacy with a demon was deeply disturbing.
The village priest was ill prepared to counsel those in need of psychiatric analysis or those who encountered paranormal phenomena. So he did the only thing he knew how to do. He blessed her and sent her home with a verbal instruction to be thereafter chaste in mind, body, and spirit. Unfortunately, Rosie did not find in that simple instruction the means to cope with her sorrow.
When the baby was born, Rosie wept over the child's beauty, seeing some of the father's traits stamped plainly upon her face. After leaving the newborn on the steps of a church in another village where no one would suspect her birth was "tainted", Rosie took her own tragic life with drugs easily obtained by an apothecary's daughter.
Deliverance, who had always been as happy as a demon can be, was devastated by the loss of the witch he loved and was left alone with what was theretofore considered impossible: an incubus with a broken heart. Since he had not seen or touched the infant, he gave no more thought to his offspring. He never, in fact, so much as troubled himself to learn whether Rosie Pottinger had given birth to a baby that survived. Simply put, deprived of his lover, Deliverance cared about nothing, which is why, thereafter, he embraced his dark half and began to behave more like his father than his mother.
Of course Litha knew nothing about her unusual heritage or the source of her extraordinary gifts. She could not know that she had her father's black hair and a light kiss of his bronze tinted skin that gave her color even through a long Scotia winter. She could not know that she had her mother's deep green eyes, rosy cheeks, and luscious lips so naturally red they never needed artificial color.
What she did know was that she was different. The monks had gone to great lengths to teach her from infancy that those differences must be carefully hidden from most of the people most of the time. There were some things that not even The Order knew. For instance, she had a miraculous resistance to the dangers of fire. In other words, she couldn't be burned.
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CHAPTER 7
After dinner Ram asked Elora to please wait for him in the lobby. In less than five minutes he showed up with jackets and an I've-got-a-secret smile. When she looked at him questioningly, he helped her into her jacket, put his arm around her shoulders and gently nudged her toward the door. "How about goin' out for a bit."
He was clearly enjoying himself so she didn't grill him about what he was up to.
They walked straight south in the direction of the castle. Before they started down the steps to the gardens they stopped at a newsstand where Ram bought one Toblerone chocolate bar and handed it to his bride. Ten minutes later they were standing in front of the National Museum. It would normally be a five-minute walk, but they strolled leisurely in the late Northern gloaming while Elora enjoyed her after dinner chocolate fix.
"Here we are," Ram said.
"Ram, it's almost ten o'clock at night. The museum is long closed."
"No' for us," he grinned and steered her toward a side door.
He knocked and the door opened as if someone on the other side was waiting there. They ducked inside and removed jackets while Ram shook hands with the security guard and thanked him for letting them in.
Their footsteps echoed loudly in the vacuous marble expanses as they hurried past irreplaceable treasures of art and history. They passed dozens of armed guards who nodded as they walked past the central stairway and descended a small staircase at the rear. The lower level was illuminated by low level lighting. They walked for some distance in the immense building. Elora noticed there was a higher concentration of armed guards. After passing through several Employees Only checkpoints, they arrived at what seemed to be a dead end. It was a plain, nondescript door that, once again, said "Employees Only". If pressed, she would have guessed that a utility closet would be found on the other side of that door, but instead, it opened to a vault entrance much like the one in Baka's former prison. She looked at Ram, who smiled like he could hardly wait for her to see what would happen next.
The guard punched in a code then stepped aside while Ram did the same. With a hiss, the hydraulic locks spun open. The guard pulled back on the wheel centered on the twelve-inch thick door to reveal the space beyond. He smiled at Elora. "There's nothin' more secure than the king's museum. Unless, of course, it would be the wing that belongs to The Order."
Elora was surprised to hear this museum guard speak about The Order.
When the door was pulled open Elora could see that the lights came on inside. Ram motioned for her to enter. Inside was a gallery perhaps a hundred and twenty feet long and thirty feet across. There was no furniture other than a few ornately carved wooden benches on the periphery. Nothing but large, framed paintings on both walls, facing each other. Each was a portrait about eight feet high and four feet wide.
The space vibrated with an energy that was difficult to describe, but Elora got a mental impression that she was in the presence of something held sacred.
"Is this...?"
He nodded and looked around with pride, imagining he was seeing it for the first time through her eyes.
Slowly she began to walk the room, taking in each visage, trying to imagine the knight portrayed as he was when he had lived. Beside each was a brass plaque engraved with their name and the year they had been memorialized.
Some of the oldest wore actual armor and held shields with family crests. What they had in common was a posture and determined expression that she knew oh so very well.
After half an hour, she came to the last space currently occupied. A portrait hung there, obscured from view by white silk draping. When she realized what it was, Elora's hand flew to her mouth. She took in a deep breath having vowed to stop being such a weeper. Her eyes watered, but did not overflow. She stepped close enough to the plaque to read: Sir Rammel Aelshelm Hawking, Knight of The Order of the Black Swan, Prince of Elves. She looked at her new husband who was waiting for her reaction.
She smiled. “I guess it would be bad luck to look underneath?”